"Socrates" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... work, when the question arose, which has probably interested all intelligent school-girls for many a year— What made so many Athenians,—so many, that there must have been some wise and good men among them,—treat such a person as Socrates in the way they did? Margaret was quite occupied in admiring the sort of Socratic method, with which Maria drew out from the minds of her pupils some of the difficult philosophy of Opinion, and the liberality with which she ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... of dress. But it does not prove anything. Men rise by their strength, not by their weakness. Some men wait until after they have become rich or famous to become negligent of their personal appearance. But it is well to remember that "if Socrates and Aristippus have done aught against custom or good manner, let not a man think he can do the same: for they obtained this license by their ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... believe in Chubb, Collins, Toland, Tindal, and Hobbes. I believe in Lord Bolingbroke, and I believe not in St. Paul. I believe not in revelation; I believe in tradition; I believe in the Talmud; I believe in the Koran; I believe not in the Bible. I believe in Socrates; I believe in Confucius; I believe in Mahomet; I believe not in Christ. And lastly, I ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... her heart set on it, A. A.," he explained. "It's going to be a sorrel horse, you see,—with a blue tail and a red head. Mustard, hollyhocks and geraniums is what she's going to plant here when I get the bed fixed. Socrates,—he was the best horse I ever straddled,—he was a sorrel. ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... doing you wrong, Young fellow from Socrates' land? You, like a Hermes so lissome and strong, Fresh from the master Praxiteles' hand? So you're of Spartan birth? Descended, perhaps, from one of the band— Deathless in story and song— Who combed their long hair at Thermopylae's pass? Ah, ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... The better members of this class represented the intelligence and culture of their sex in Greece, and more especially in the Ionian provinces. As an instance we need only recall Aspasia and her well-attested relation to Pericles and Socrates. Our heroine Rhodopis was a celebrated woman. The Hetaera, Thargalia of Miletus, became the wife of a Thessalian king. Ptolemy Lagi married Thais; her daughter was called Irene, and her sons Leontiskus and Lagus. Finally, statues were ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... What touching favor in his instructions! What elevation in his maxims! What presence of mind! What ingenuity, and what justice in his answers! What government of his passions! What prejudice, blindness or ill faith must that be which dares to compare Socrates with the Son ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... to others the opinions of the critic, it puts them in a state to appreciate the work of art itself. A man blest with peculiar sensibility, who happens also to possess this infecting power, need feel no more shame in becoming a critic than Socrates would have felt in becoming a don. The vocations are much alike. The good critic puts his pupil in the way of enjoying art, the good don or schoolmaster teaches his how to make the most of life; while bad critics and pedagogues ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... expressed by it to be furnished by a milliner, a taylor, or a perriwig-maker; no, nor even by a dancing-master himself. According to the idea I myself conceive from this word, I should not have scrupled to call Socrates a well-bred man, though, I believe, he was very little instructed by any of the persons I have above enumerated. In short, by good-breeding (notwithstanding the corrupt use of the word in a very ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... without its heroes. The least incapable general in a nation is its Caesar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon, the least confused thinker its Socrates, the least ...
— Maxims for Revolutionists • George Bernard Shaw
... academic sect derived its origin from Socrates, and its name from a celebrated gymnasium, or place of exercise, in the suburbs of Athens, called the Academy, after Ecademus, who possessed it in the time of the Tyndaridae. It was afterwards purchased, and dedicated to the public, ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... Socrates How singular is the thing called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite; for they never come to a man together, and yet he who pursues either of them is generally compelled to take the other. They are two, and ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... brought out his "Death of Socrates," and Louis Thiers published the first instalments of his great "History of the French Revolution." Simultaneously there appeared Francois Mignet's "History of the French Revolution." While these historians were expounding the lessons of this great regeneration of France, ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... thought Hamlet really insane. 8. The President and the Senate appoint certain men ministers to foreign courts. 9. Shylock would have struck Jessica dead beside him. 10. Custom renders the feelings blunt and callous. 11. Socrates styled beauty a short-lived tyranny. 12. Madame de Stael calls beautiful architecture frozen music. 13. They named the state New York from the Duke of York. 14. Henry the Great consecrated the Edict of Nantes as the ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... of 1814, to Advocate Kauka. "Socrates and Jesus were my exemplars," he remarks in a conversation-book ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... market-place,—the Roman forum, the Greek agora. The government carried on in them was a more or less qualified democracy. In the palmy days of Athens it was a pure democracy. The assemblies which in the Athenian market-place declared war against Syracuse, or condemned Socrates to death, were quite like New England town-meetings, except that they exercised greater powers because there was no ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... and eighty-five before the Christian era, and on the very day on which Themistocles with a handful of Grecians defeated the immense army of Xerxes. He was nobly descended on the maternal side, and was placed in due time under the first preceptors. From Prodicus he learned eloquence; from Socrates, ethics, and under Anaxagoras he studied philosophy. His parents having, before he was born, consulted the oracle of Apollo respecting his fate, were informed that the world should witness his fame, and that he would gain a crown. Of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... prayer and her unshared experiences in prayer,—she showers upon us continually gleams and glances of the sunniest merriment, amid all her sighs and tears. She roasts in caustic the gross-minded, and the self-satisfied, and the self-righteous, as Socrates himself never roasted them better. Again, like his, her irony and her raillery and her satire are sometimes so delicate that it quite eludes you for the first two or three readings of the exquisite page. And then, when you turn the leaf, she is ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... showers of soot and smoke when the wind is right (and it usually is) straight over Number 328, where, according to John Addington Symonds and William Michael Rossetti, lived the mightiest seer of the century—the man whom they rank with Socrates, Epictetus, Saint Paul, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... How my Philip was slain, I wept and I wailed, The tears down hailed; But nothing it avail'd To call Philip again Whom Gib our cat hath slain. Heu, heu, me, That I am woe for thee! Levavi oculos meos in montis; Would that I had Xenophontis Or Socrates the Wise, To show me their device Moderately to take This sorrow that I make For Philip Sparrow's sake! It had a velvet cap, And would sit on my lap, And seek after small worms, And sometimes white bread crumbs; And many times and oft Within my breast soft It would lie and rest. Sometimes ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... Socrates was a fool to want to be killed when he had done nothing to deserve it," said Thornton, with a yawn, as he ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... asked whether I wished to see any persons in particular; to which I replied that I wished to see the philosophers. "There are two who live here at hand in this garden; they are good neighbors and very friendly toward one another." "Who are they?" "Socrates and Helvetius." "I esteem them both highly; but let me see Helvetius first, because I understand a little French but not a word of Greek." I was conducted to him; he received me with much courtesy, having known me, he said, by character some ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... patient with sixty little ones, just beginning to tread the difficult paths of learning, and each receiving just one sixtieth of what he craves. The millennium will be close at hand when we cease to expect from girls just out of the high school what Socrates never attempted, and would ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... burghers, and be the best thing in their lives, we, who are—the world being judge—humane, honest, and serious individually, have a patriotism that is the worst thing in ours. What have we done, and where have we wandered, we that have produced sages who could have spoken with Socrates and poets who could walk with Dante, that we should talk as if we have never done anything more intelligent than found colonies and kick niggers? We are the children of light, and it is we that sit in darkness. If we are judged, it will not be for the merely intellectual ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... choir; 30 To th'one the style of friend he did impart, On th'other stamp the likeness of his heart: And Moses, in the old original, Even God the poet of the world doth call. Next those old Greeks Pythagoras did rise, Then Socrates, whom th'oracle call'd Wise; The divine Plato moral virtue shows, Then his disciple Aristotle rose, Who Nature's secrets to the world did teach, Yet that great soul our novelists impeach; 40 Too much manuring fill'd that field with weeds, While sects, ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... a clever man Run as quickly as you can. You must never, never, never Think that Socrates was clever. The cleverest thing I ever knew Now cracks walnuts at the Zoo. Children, let a wandering fool Stuff your ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... commandment, I have put me in devoir to oversee this his said book, and behold as nigh as I could how it accordeth with the original, being in French. And I find nothing discordant therein, save only in the dictes and sayings of Socrates, wherein I find that my said Lord hath left out certain and divers conclusions touching women. Whereof I marvel that my Lord hath not written them, ne what hath moved him so to do, ne what cause he had at that time; but ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... representing the Earl introducing Caxton to Edward the Fourth, his Queen, and the Prince. "The most remarkable circumstance attending it," says Walpole, in his Noble Authors, "is the gallantry of the Earl, who omitted to translate part of it, because it contained sarcasms of Socrates against the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... the weeks passed, his whole mode of life affected both mind and body. Yet, if it be the highest state of man for the soul to live by itself, as Socrates used to teach, and sever itself from bodily association, Brandon surely had attained, without knowing it, a most exalted stage of existence. Perhaps it was the period of purification and ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... "De Senectute," are the stories of men who have found new occupations when growing old, or kept up their common pursuits in the extreme period of life. Cato learned Greek when he was old, and speaks of wishing to learn the fiddle, or some such instrument, (fidibus,) after the example of Socrates. Solon learned something new, every day, in his old age, as he gloried to proclaim. Cyrus pointed out with pride and pleasure the trees he had planted with his own hand. [I remember a pillar on the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Boyd's inn, at the head of the Canongate. I went to him directly. He embraced me cordially; and I exulted in the thought, that I now had him actually in Caledonia. Mr Scott's amiable manners, and attachment to our Socrates, at once united me to him. He told me that, before I came in, the Doctor had unluckily had a bad specimen of Scottish cleanliness. He then drank no fermented liquor. He asked to have his lemonade made sweeter; upon which the waiter, with his greasy fingers, lifted ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... of five days, in as many books. We proceeded in this manner: when he who had proposed the subject for discussion had said what he thought proper, I spoke against him; for this is, you know, the old and Socratic method of arguing against another's opinion; for Socrates thought that thus the truth would more easily be arrived at. But to give you a better notion of our disputations, I will not barely send you an account of them, but represent them to you as they were carried on; therefore let the introduction ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... unity and brotherhood has been enunciated again and again—from the tub of Diogenes, from Socrates and his golden-haired disciple; from that superb slave, Epictetus, whose spirit has since been a tonic for all races of men; from the deep-hearted emperor Aurelius—and even before these, whom we have the temerity to ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... Americus gave his name to the continent discovered by Columbus. In many respects Zwingli was the most liberal of the Reformers. In his last work he expressed the belief that in heaven would be saved not only Christians and the worthies of the Old Testament but also "Hercules, Theseus, Socrates, Aristides, Antigonus, Numa, Camillus, the Catos and Scipios. . . . In a word no good man has ever existed, nor shall there exist a holy mind, a faithful soul, from the very foundation of the world to its consummation, whom you will not see there with God." Nevertheless, Zwingli was a persecutor ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Wit-forsaken progeny of a more than soporific pericranium! Fight me!—Hear and be astonished, O Cicero, Demosthenes, Socrates, ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... such friends as wee, Few words suffice: and therefore, if thou know One rich enough to be Petruchio's wife: (As wealth is burthen of my woing dance) Be she as foule as was Florentius Loue, As old as Sibell, and as curst and shrow'd As Socrates Zentippe, or a worse: She moues me not, or not remoues at least Affections edge in me. Were she is as rough As are the swelling Adriaticke seas. I come to wiue it wealthily in Padua: If wealthily, then happily ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... of the works of either of those justly distinguished men would find his account in procuring their admission to the membership of learned bodies on the Continent,—a proceeding no whit more incongruous than the reversal of the judgment against Socrates, when he was already more than twenty centuries beyond the reach of antidotes, and when his memory had acquired a deserved respectability. I conceive that it was a feeling of the importance of this precaution which induced Mr. Locke to style himself "Gent." on the title-page ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... of life, and then to come back to our hearts and conscience. I think that the best way of considering it, and the most interesting, is to view it as it may be seen in the lives of good men everywhere, whether Christians or so-called heathens— Socrates, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, as well as in the lives of Christ, or Bunyan, or Spinoza. The study of religious biography seems to me one of the best modes of keeping up ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... Socrates once said, in one of his wise paradoxes, that it was better to sin knowingly than ignorantly. That is a hard saying, but it means that at least if we sin knowingly, there is some purpose, some ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the Athenian was born 431 B.C. He was a pupil of Socrates. He marched with the Spartans, and was exiled from Athens. Sparta gave him land and property in Scillus, where he lived for many years before having to move once more, to settle in Corinth. He died in ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon
... rank among them slept with him in the prison, having bribed the prison guards. Then they were accustomed to bring in all kinds of viands, and they read their sacred Scriptures together, and the most excellent Peregrinus (for such was still his name) was styled by them a New Socrates. ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... vices. How we poor innocent urchins were tormented by the task imposed upon us! How we put more ink on our hands and faces than we shed upon the white paper on our desks! Our conclusions generally agreed with those announced by the greatest moralists of the world. Socrates and Plato, Cicero and Seneca, Cudworth and Butler, could not have been more austerely moral than were we little rogues, as we relieved the immense exertion involved in completing a single short baby-like sentence, by ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Years' War Shaftesbury, Lord Shakespeare Shelley Shooting Niagara Sidney, Sir Philip Signs of the Times Simon de Montfort Sinclair, Sir George Slavery Sloane, Sir Hans Smail, Tom Smith, Adam Smith, Goldwin Smith, Sydney Smollett Snowdon Socrates Sophocles Southey Spain Spedding Spencer, Herbert Spenser Stanley, Dean Stanley, Lady Augusta Stanleys (of Alderley) Steele Stein Stephen, Fitzjames Stephen, Sir James Sterling Sterling, Life of Sterne Stewart, Dugald Stodart, Miss Eliza Stonehenge Strachey, Mr. Strachey, Mrs. Stralsund ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... fronts the present baths, and that therefore the footprint is illusory.) I am growing used to a certain irrelevancy in YAHKOB's conversation. My German is of the date of CHARLEMAGNE, and is no more understood here than is the Greek of SOCRATES in the streets of Athens. YAHKOB was especially told off for my service because he thoroughly understood and talked English. He says, "Ye-es" and "Ver well." But when I offer a chance remark he, three times out ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... quickly fire, and kindle into rage. Not so mild Thales nor Chrysippus thought, Nor that good man, who drank the poisonous draught With mind serene; and could not wish to see His vile accuser drink as deep as he: Exalted Socrates! divinely brave! Injur'd he fell, and dying he forgave! Too noble for revenge; which still we find The weakest frailty of a feeble ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... prejudices," he had not written, or at least published, very much prose; his mannerisms had not hardened. And above all, he was but just catching the public ear, and so was not tempted to assume the part of Chesterfield-Socrates, which he played later, to the diversion of some, to the real improvement of many, but a little to his own disaster. He was very thoroughly acquainted with the facts of his subject, which was not always the case later; and though his assumptions—the insensibility ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... them. But history being captive to the truth of a foolish world, in many times a terror from well- doing, and an encouragement to unbridled wickedness. For see we not valiant Miltiades rot in his fetters? the just Phocion and the accomplished Socrates put to death like traitors? the cruel Severus live prosperously? the excellent Severus miserably murdered? Sylla and Marius dying in their beds? Pompey and Cicero slain then when they would have thought exile a happiness? See we not virtuous Cato driven to kill ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... this good old man," said Miss Bell, "who teaches wisdom to Monsieur Choulette. There was at Athens a cobbler named Simon, who wrote books on philosophy, and who was the friend of Socrates. I have always thought that Monsieur Choulette ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... master of the divine Aristotle,—and the divine Socrates, master of the divine Plato—used to say that the soul was corporeal and eternal. No doubt but the demon of Socrates had instructed him in the nature of it. Some people, indeed, pretend that a man who boasted his being attended by a familiar genius must ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... and makes a comfortable home for the queen of his heart, because home life is the ideal of every Greek and he is a model as head of the family, in his moderate means trying to raise children to his generation and give them the best he can afford. Hopeful, that some Socrates or Demosthenes might develop out of his offspring. The Greek has never been identified with any unlawful or criminal movement of the so-called Anarchistic or Socialistic. The Greek at all times and under all circumstances is an example as a ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... person on the Athenian side during this latter period of the struggle was Alcibiades, a versatile and brilliant man, but a reckless and unsafe counsellor. He was a pupil of Socrates, but he failed to follow the counsels of his teacher. His astonishing escapades only seemed to attach the people more closely to him, for he possessed all those personal traits which make men popular idols. His influence over ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... pleaded Lord Mallow, "it is only four, and I know the Duchess does not take tea till five. Give me one of your last hours. A lady who is just going to be married is something like Socrates after his sentence. Her friends surround her; she is in their midst, smiling, serene, diffusing sweetness and light; but they know she is going from them—they are to lose her, yes, to lose her almost as utterly as if she were ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... gracious offer on the ground that he had just Planned a summer's tour through his own back yard. What did Agassiz find on that tour? Instruction for the children of many generations, a treatise on animal life, and later a text-book of Zoology. Kant, the philosopher, the greatest mind since Socrates, was never forty miles from his birthplace. On the other hand, Grant Allen, author, scholar, and traveler, says: "One year in the great university we call Europe, will teach one more than three at Yale or Columbia. And what it teaches ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... been seen of greatness and goodness going down before the poisonous tongues and the licking jaws. Even Caesar himself had to fall at last, his strong soul perhaps not sorry to escape through his dagger-wounds from so pitiably small a world; and the poison in the death-cup of Socrates was not so much the juice of the hemlock as the venom of ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... artificial, what is meant is that it is artifice. It must be artificial, in the sense that all is there for the sake of the picture. But it is not to be the contrivance of the painter; the purpose must be in the work, not in his head. Diotima, in Plato's "Banquet," tells Socrates that Eros desires not the beautiful, but to bring forth in the beautiful; the creative impulse itself must be the motive, not anything ulterior. We require of the artist that he shall build better than he knows,—that his work shall not be the statement of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... the aspect of a most benevolent and pacific system; they tended to humanize the world and render his people happy; while his ideas of deity were so elevated as to bear a comparison with the sublime doctrines of Socrates ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... and durable system is erected. The argumentum ad hominem, a kind of argument most efficacious in debate, but utterly useless for the investigation of general principles, is among their favourite resources. Hence, though nothing can be more admirable than the skill which Socrates displays in the conversations which Plato has reported or invented, his victories, for the most part, seem to us unprofitable. A trophy is set up; but no new province is added to the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... read that wonderful compound of dramatic humor and philosophic thought, Plato's "Banquet," without being moved by the generous and impassioned eulogy which Alcibiades, in the fulness of his heart and of his wine, pours out upon the austere virtue of Socrates. Such as Alcibiades is there described we may suppose Alcibiades to have been, and no one who has followed the career of Bolingbroke can believe it possible that he ever could have felt any sincere admiration for virtue in man ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... constantly presented to him, were remembered when the speeches that contained them were forgotten. He seems to have written nothing himself; but it was not long before the gems which he scattered began to be gathered up in collections, as a distinct species of literature. The great and good Socrates employed himself, while in prison, in turning the fables of Aesop into verse. Though but a few fragments of his composition have come down to us, he may, perhaps, be regarded as the father of fable, considered as a distinct art. Induced by his example, many Greek poets and ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... as good as gold," said Unity pensively, "and as wise as—as Socrates, and wore black cockades, and cared only for the Washington March, and hated Buonaparte, and the Devil, how tiresome life would be!—Myself, I ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... is so large and has so many figures that it would not be easy to reproduce it here, and give a good idea of its various parts; so a portion only is shown, depicting what is commonly known as the group of Socrates and Alcibiades. Socrates can surely be distinguished, for he had a singular face and head. Some have thought the companion was ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... my mind that he entertained no principle, either to influence his heart or to guide his understanding, but vanity. With this vice he was possessed to a degree little short of madness. It is from the same deranged, eccentric vanity, that this, the insane Socrates of the National Assembly, was impelled to publish a mad confession of his mad faults, and to attempt a new sort of glory from bringing hardily to light the obscure and vulgar vices which we know may sometimes be blended with eminent talents. He has ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... old wounds scar? In the dark age Perish'd the wise. Light came; how fares the sage? There's no abatement of the bigot's rage. Still as the wise man bled, he bleeds again. Sophists prepared for Socrates the bowl— And Christians drove the steel through Rousseau's soul— Rousseau who ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... of Paganism. "The Pagan glory of war for its own sake is gone." When clerical writers speak of Paganism they think that any evil deed ever done by a Pagan is characteristic of the whole body; they ask us to apply a different standard to their own body. Plato and Socrates were Pagans; Marcus Aurelius and Antoninus Pius—to speak of warriors and statesmen—were Pagans. The truth is that a glory in war for its own sake was no more generally characteristic of Paganism than it was of Christian Europe until a century ago: it was probably less. Most of the German ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... in our own era, that knowledge which conduces to personal well-being has been postponed to that which brings applause. In the Greek schools, music, poetry, rhetoric, and a philosophy which, until Socrates taught, had but little bearing upon action, were the dominant subjects; while knowledge, aiding the arts of life, had a very subordinate place. And in our own universities and schools at the present moment the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... conclusion? That he knew more about the matter than the special Inter-Allied commission is hardly to be supposed. Indeed, nobody assumed that he was any better informed on that subject than about Teschen. The explanation put in circulation by interested persons was that, like Socrates, he had his own familiar demon to prompt him, who, like all such spirits, chose to flourish, like the violet, in the shade. That this source of light was accessible to the Prime Minister may, his apologists hold, one day prove a boon to the peoples whose ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... ideal—ecstatic contemplation." Something in me leapt to approve it; but the stronger pull was to Hellenism and the West. "Go your way, Ramakrishna," I said, "but your way is not mine. For me and my kind action not meditation; the temporal not the eternal; the human not the ultra-divine; Socrates not Ramakrishna!" But hardly had I said the words ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... of fashionable extravagance and of the successful efforts to restrain it made by The Honorable Socrates Potter ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... life of Fitzgerald, published in Dublin: "Not Greece of old in her palmiest days—the Greece of Homer and Demosthenes, of Eschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, of Pericles, Leonidas, and Alcibiades, of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, of Solon and Lycurgus, of Apelles and Praxiteles—not even this Greece, prolific as she was in sages and heroes, can boast such a lengthy bead-roll as Ireland can of names immortal in history!" But "this was for Irish consumption." And popular ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... deity. The Athenians, from time immemorial, had been noted for their intellectual elevation; and a brilliant array of poets, legislators, historians, philosophers, and orators, had crowned their community with immortal fame. Every spot connected with their city was classic ground. Here it was that Socrates had discoursed so sagely; and that Plato had illustrated, with so much felicity and genius, the precepts of his great master; and that Demosthenes, by addresses of unrivalled eloquence, had roused and agitated the assemblies of his countrymen. As the stranger passed ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... some provision which she produced, she cursed him most immoderately in the country language, which was the only one she spoke, and threatened, if he attempted to breed any disturbance in her house, to turn the horses, himself, and his master forthwith out of doors. Socrates himself, however, could not have conducted himself on this occasion with greater forbearance than Antonio, who shrugged his shoulders, muttered something in Greek, and ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... signifies his barren shine Of moral powers and reason? His English style and gesture line Are a' clean out of season. Like Socrates or Antonine, Or some auld pagan heathen, The moral man he does define, But ne'er a word o' faith in ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... make that calculation looking out into the mild freedom of the country night, he turned back and went up to the chimney-piece. There were his pet bronzes—a Cleopatra with the asp at her breast; a Socrates; a greyhound playing with her puppy; a strong man reining in some horses. 'They last!' he thought, and a pang went through his heart. They had a thousand years of life ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... respect of the specific nature, as the faculty of laughing is natural to man, and it is natural to fire to have an upward tendency. Secondly, in respect of the individual nature, as it is natural to Socrates or Plato to be prone to sickness or inclined to health, in accordance with their respective temperaments. Again, in respect of both natures, something may be called natural in two ways: first, because it entirely is from the nature; ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... drunk deep of Socrates, that her spiritual sense reached onward to the Platonic Socrates. In this supersensuous world of thought she is quieted out of the weakness which made her miserable over the fall of Athens; and in the quiet, Browning, who will ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... from d'Herbelot's Bibliotheque Orientale, that from the earliest periods the Eastern nations were in the habit of preserving the maxims of their sages. From them the practice passed to the Greeks and Romans. Plato and Xenophon treasured up and recorded the sayings of their master Socrates; and Arrian, in the concluding books of his Enchiridion, now lost, collected the casual observations of Epictetus. The numerous apophthegms scattered in Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius and other writers, show that it was customary in Greece to preserve the colloquially expressed ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... indisputable what others ought to do, because they would infallibly do it. I had only actually come to understand what I had known for a long time previously, the theory which was given to men from the very earliest times, both by Buddha, and Isaiah, and Lao-Tze, and Socrates, and in a peculiarly clear and indisputable manner by Jesus Christ and his forerunner, John the Baptist. John the Baptist, in answer to the question of the people,—What were they to do? replied simply, briefly, and clearly: "He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... it would seem to transmute Socrates into a mythus, considering the broad daylight which then rested upon Athenian history, and the inextricable way in which Socrates is entangled in that history (although we have all seen many a Scriptural personage so transmuted under far less colourable ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... born immortal and capable of progress, and so differing from Socrates and Shakspeare only in degree. It is but a sliding scale from this melancholy debasement up to the most regal condition of humanity. A traceable line of affinity unites these outcast children with the renowned historic ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... that Socrates and the great Greeks and Romans who acted up to the light that was within them were not sent to hell. I think that is ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... the young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the young man raw from Oxford—he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato, and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna: (alias Sokrat, Aristotalis, Aflatun, Bokrat, Jalinus, and Bu Ali Sena); and, what is much to his advantage in India, the languages in which he has learnt what he knows are those which he most requires ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... Socrates recommends fathers of families to observe the practice of their thrifty neighbours—of those who spend their means to the best advantage,—and to profit by their example. Thrift is essentially practical, and can best be taught by facts. Two men earn, say, five shillings a day. They are ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... says Socrates, "because you thought to escape from giving an account of your lives. But you will be disappointed. There are others to convict you, accusers whom I held back when you knew it not, they will be harsher ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... into the nature of justice we get little help from the wisdom of the ancients. They wrestled with the question but seem to have been as puzzled as we of today. Indeed, Plato represents the sage Socrates as frankly confessing his inability to answer satisfactorily the persistent question "What is justice?" The question comes up for discussion by Socrates and some friends at the home of Cephalus at the Piraeus. Socrates criticizes and punctures the definitions ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... tragedy makes room for him, because the tragic personages, "Tragic Comedians" as they are, can bear the strain of the contrast. The selection of personages and motives is made in another way in the romantic schools, but this poem of Chaucer's is not romance. It is the fulfilment of the prophecy of Socrates, just before Aristophanes and the tragic poet had to be put to bed at the end of the Symposium, that the best author of tragedy is the best author of comedy also. It is the freedom of the imagination, beyond all the limits of partial ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... emerged within sight of the High Road Sea. So we have burst at times, weeping and rejoicing, upon startled wayfarers. Usually I took the part of that distinguished general Xenophen—and please note the quantity of the o. I have all my classical names like that,—Socrates rhymes with Bates for me, and except when the bleak eye of some scholar warns me of his standards of judgment, I use those dear old mispronunciations still. The little splash into Latin made during ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... while their officers ([Greek: hoi en telei auton]) succeeded, by bribing the keepers, in passing the night inside with him. Then various meals were brought in, and religious discourses were held between them, and this excellent Peregrinus (for he still bore this name) was entitled a new Socrates by them. Moreover, there came from certain cities in Asia deputies sent by the Christian communities to assist and advise and console the man. Indeed they show incredible despatch, when any matter ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... authors of the epigrams which he had picked up here and there; and, though the satire they contained was venomous in some cases, still he, the sovereign of the world, stood so high that he could laugh them to scorn, as Socrates had laughed when Aristophanes placed him on ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Julia, Marcia, and Cornelia; and alone, apart, I saw the Saladin. When I raised my brow a little more, I saw the Master of those who know, seated amid the philosophic family; all regard him, all do him honor. Here I saw both Socrates and Plato, who before the others stand nearest to him; Democritus, who ascribes the world to chance; Diogenes, Anaxagoras, and Thales, Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Zeno; and I saw the good collector of the qualities, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... a new idea, has consecrated his life to it. Through such men the world receives new and mighty impulses toward its enlightenment, civilization takes vast strides in its development, and man approaches nearer his final emancipation. Confucius, Socrates, Augustine, Charlemagne, Luther, Bacon, Comenius, Pestalozzi, Froebel, are names that suggest the uplifting of humanity and the betterment of the world. The study of the lives of these men, of ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... enough had already happened to make him as philosophical as Socrates. Epictetus remarks that our chief happiness should consist in knowing that we are entirely indifferent to calamity; that disgrace is nothing if our consciences are right and that death, far from being a calamity ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... learning as a naturalist and his eye for the facts—things Aristotle also possessed—he is like Aristotle profoundly out of sympathy with nature. Aristotle was alienated from nature and any penetrating study of it by the fact that he was a disciple of Socrates, and therefore essentially a moralist and a logician. M. Bergson is alienated from nature by something quite different; he is the adept of a very modern, very subtle, and very arbitrary art, that of literary psychology. In this art the imagination is invited to conceive things as ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... alteration or accident; all other substance is liable to alteration or accident; therefore, the divine substance differs from all other substance. A substance is a universal; as for example, Humanity, or the Human, is a universal and indivisible; the Man Socrates, for instance, is not a universal, but an individual; therefore, the substance Humanity, being indivisible, must exist entire ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... antique busts," he said, "you will find that Socrates is Silenus dignified. I choose to believe in the infinite capacities of all men—and in the spirit in all. And so I try to restore my poor boy his capacities and his spirit. But that was not all. The time was coming when I could do no more for him, when the ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... effort, he would get on his legs and gaze wistfully on the lively crowd so unmindful of his wretchedness, then sink back exhausted, reminding me of some grand old monarch, statesman, or warrior looking for the last time on the scenes of his former triumphs. I should have named him Socrates. At last he was carried to a cool resting place in the deep grass, covered with pink mosquito netting, and one kind friend after another fanned him and watched over his last moments. After he was really dead, and Tom with tears rolling down his face carried him tenderly away, I woke from ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... Pertaining to the philosophy of Socrates. Platonic Love is a fool's name for the affection between ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... for you, the admirers of Burns will say to us; there is the application of ideas to life! There is, undoubtedly. The doctrine of the last-quoted lines coincides almost exactly with what was the aim and end, Xenophon tells us, of all the teaching of Socrates. And the application is a powerful one; made by a man of vigorous understanding, and (need I say?) a master ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... himself and bridle them. "To-morrow I made my fortune," cries the fool, "To-day I'll spend it." Thus will Folly eat His chicken ere the hen hath laid the egg. So Folly blossoms with promises all the year— Promises that bud and blossom but to blast. "All men are fools," said Socrates, the wise, And in the broader sense I grant it true, For even Socrates had his Xanthipp'. Whose head is wise oft hath a foolish heart; The wisest has more follies than he needs; Wisdom and madness, too, are near akin. The marrow-maddening canker-worm of love Feeds on the brains of ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... fine new Bible]. For Aristotle wrote concerning civil morals so learnedly that nothing further concerning this need be demanded. We see books extant in which certain sayings of Christ are compared with the sayings of Socrates, Zeno, and others, as though Christ had come for the purpose of delivering certain laws through which we might merit the remission of sins, as though we did not receive this gratuitously, because of His merits. Therefore, ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... persons congenial whose ideas resemble ours, and gravitate to them, as leaves on a pond do to one another, nearer and nearer till they touch. Is it likely, then, that in the most important case of all the rule should suddenly cease to hold? Is it to be presumed that even Socrates chose Xantippe for her remarkable ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... protect themselves from death,—the whole purpose of alchemy lies there, sire. If man, the most perfect animal on this globe, bore within himself a portion of the divine, he would not die; but he does die. To solve this difficulty, Socrates and his school invented the Soul. I, the successor of so many great and unknown kings, the rulers of this science, I stand for the ancient theories, not the new. I believe in the transformations of matter ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... in his cottage that stood the edge of the campus, gazing at a plaster bust of Socrates which he did not see. Since that morning he had ceased to sit in the chair of history at Stillwater College. They were retrenching, the chancellor had told him curtly, cutting down unnecessary ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... Socrates, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Zeno, and having knocked with the hammer against the door, he ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... or vicious nature; it is a taste which is indulged at home; it tends to make home pleasant, and to endear us to the spot on which it is our lot to live." When Mr. Johnson forcibly paints the allurements to a love for this art, when concluding his energetic volume on gardening, by quoting from Socrates, that "it is the source of health, strength, plenty, riches, and of a thousand sober delights and honest pleasures."—And from Lord Verulam, that amid its scenes and pursuits, "life flows pure, and the ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... stories, written and unwritten, which were the common inheritance of the Aryan peoples. Mixed up with these are a number of stories which are not strictly fables; five of them are about Aesop himself, and there are also stories told of Simonides, Socrates, and Menander. Two are from the history of his own time, one relating a grim jest of the Emperor Tiberius, and the other a domestic tragedy which had been for a while the talk of the town in the previous reign. There are also, besides the prologues and ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... the understanding as a receiver which does nothing but receive the liquid which is poured into it? to those theologians who, not content with despising Aristotle and Plato, think themselves obliged to vilify Socrates and calumniate Regulus? We will tell them that they depart from the grand Christian tradition, of which they believe themselves par excellence the representatives. We will add that they outrage their Master by seeming to believe that in order to exalt Him it is necessary ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... between these authors might lead us to raise the question long ago discussed by Socrates at Agathon's banquet—Can the same man write both comedies and tragedies? We in England are accustomed to read the serious and comic plays of Shakspere, Fletcher, Jonson, and to think that one poet could excel in either branch. The custom ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Old Socrates who thought he knew A philosophic thing or two, Believed that man was made to walk Or lounge about the streets and talk Of life and death and virtues true, And what a fellow ought to do; While poor Xantippe, so I'm told, Remained at home to ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... any of the nations of antiquity, not excepting the Jews. In her they beheld something sacred and divine. In her voice was inspiration, and in her presence there was safety. There was no true enthusiasm for woman in Greece even when Socrates bowed before the charms of Aspasia. There was none at Rome when Volumnia screened the city from the vengeance of her angry son. But the Germans worshiped the fair, and beheld in her the incarnation of all virtue and loveliness. And thus, among such a race, arose the glorious ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... parlour door, was a plaster bust of Socrates; but this had met with no better treatment than the statues, having accidentally got its face turned to the wall as though in disgrace, or as if in despair of any really practical wisdom being allowed to have sway in ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... father died, but that I perfectly remember him, and had a very early horror of matrimony from the sight of domestic broils: this feeling came over me very strongly at my wedding. Something whispered me that I was sealing my own death- warrant. I am a great believer in presentiments: Socrates's demon was not a fiction; Monk Lewis had his monitor, and Napoleon many warnings. At the last moment I would have retreated, could I have done so; I called to mind a friend of mine, who had married a young, beautiful, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... Deo Socr. Sec. 20, ed. meae, "ut videmus plerisque usu venire, qui nimia ominum superstitione, non suopte corde, sed alterius verbo, reguntur: et per angiporta reptantes, consilia ex alienis vocibus colligunt." Such was the voice that appeared to Socrates. See Plato Theog. p. 11. A. Xenoph. Apol. 12; Proclus in Alcib. Prim. 13, p. 41. Creuz. ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... additions would be making to the mass of human knowledge, and yet, perhaps, it may be a matter of doubt whether what may be called the capacity of mind be in any marked and decided manner increasing. A Socrates, a Plato, or an Aristotle, however confessedly inferior in knowledge to the philosophers of the present day, do not appear to have been much below them in intellectual capacity. Intellect rises from a speck, continues in vigour ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... 'Socrates rather was of opinion, that what we had to learn was how to [obtain and communicate happiness] do ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... of Socrates is much remembered, which gave him warning. The Ethnick Genij are painted like our Angels; strong impulses are ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... confronted with men, not personally involved, who control enough facts and have the dialectical skill to sort out what is real perception from what is stereotype, pattern and elaboration. It is the Socratic dialogue, with all of Socrates's energy for breaking through words to meanings, and something more than that, because the dialectic in modern life must be done by men who have explored the environment as well as the ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... and pointed to his silk stockings as an evidence of aristocracy. Young Victor Murdock, then a cub reporter, promptly wrote a story to the effect that Simpson himself wore no socks at all. "Sockless Jerry," "Sockless Simpson," and then "Sockless Socrates" were sobriquets then and thereafter applied to the stalwart Populist. Simpson was at this time forty-eight years old, a man with a long, square-jawed face, his skin tanned by exposure on shipboard, in the army, and on the farm, and his mustache cut in a straight line over a large ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... I am reminded of Socrates' shrewd parody of a supposed speech of Euthydemus who, totally ignorant of statecraft, desired election to an important position in the government of the city of Athens. It is suggestive here: "I, O man of Athens, have never learned the medical art from any ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd |
